This piece first appeared in the News Review section of The Sunday Times on August 29th 1999.

A couple of years or so ago I was a guest on Start The Week, and I was authoritatively
informed by a very distinguished journalist that the whole Internet thing was
just a silly fad like ham radio in the fifties, and that if I thought any different
I was really a bit naďve. It is a very British trait – natural, perhaps,
for a country which has lost an empire and found Mr Blobby – to be so suspicious
of change.

But the change is real. I don’t think anybody would argue now that the Internet
isn’t becoming a major factor in our lives. However, it’s very new to us. Newsreaders
still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance,
a crime was planned by people ‘over the Internet.’ They don’t bother to mention
when criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans
‘over a cup of tea,’ though each of these was new and controversial in their
day.

Then there’s the peculiar way in which certain BBC presenters and journalists
(yes, Humphrys Snr., I’m looking at you) pronounce internet addresses. It goes
‘www DOT … bbc DOT… co DOT… uk SLASH…
today SLASH…’ etc., and carries the implication that they have
no idea what any of this new-fangled stuff is about, but that you lot out there
will probably know what it means.

I suppose earlier generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing
with the invention of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle,
printing, the wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these
things work, which is this:

1) everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;

2) anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly
exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;

3) anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order
of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s
been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to
work out how old you are.

This subjective view plays odd tricks on us, of course. For instance, ‘interactivity’
is one of those neologisms that Mr Humphrys likes to dangle between a pair of
verbal tweezers, but the reason we suddenly need such a word is that during
this century we have for the first time been dominated by non-interactive
forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music and television. Before
they came along all entertainment was interactive: theatre, music, sport
– the performers and audience were there together, and even a respectfully silent
audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on the unfolding of whatever drama
they were there for. We didn’t need a special word for interactivity in the
same way that we don’t (yet) need a special word for people with only one head.

I expect that history will show ‘normal’ mainstream twentieth century media
to be the aberration in all this. ‘Please, miss, you mean they could only just
sit there and watch? They couldn’t do anything? Didn’t everybody feel
terribly isolated or alienated or ignored?’

‘Yes, child, that’s why they all went mad. Before the Restoration.’

‘What was the Restoration again, please, miss?’

‘The end of the twentieth century, child. When we started to get interactivity
back.’

Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is.
We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what
we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that
it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read
on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear
on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web
anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or
in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why
is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do.
For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things
in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which
we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence
‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we
read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking
– but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in
the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual
journalist would ever make. One of the most important things you learn from
the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of
‘us’.

Of course, there’s a great deal wrong with the Internet. For one thing, only
a minute proportion of the world’s population is so far connected. I recently
heard some pundit on the radio arguing that the internet would always be just
another unbridgeable gulf between the rich and the poor for the following reasons
– that computers would always be expensive in themselves, that you had to buy
lots of extras like modems, and you had to keep upgrading your software. The
list sounds impressive but doesn’t stand up to a moment’s scrutiny. The cost
of powerful computers, which used to be around the level of jet aircraft, is
now down amongst the colour television sets and still dropping like a stone.
Modems these days are mostly built-in, and standalone models have become such
cheap commodities that companies, like Hayes, whose sole business was manufacturing
them are beginning to go bust.. Internet software from Microsoft or Netscape
is famously free. Phone charges in the UK are still high but dropping. In the
US local calls are free. In other words the cost of connection is rapidly approaching
zero, and for a very simple reason: the value of the web increases with every
single additional person who joins it. It’s in everybody’s interest for costs
to keep dropping closer and closer to nothing until every last person on the
planet is connected.

Another problem with the net is that it’s still ‘technology’, and ‘technology’,
as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is ‘stuff that doesn’t
work yet.’ We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them
as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs
should have, how tall they should be, and they would often ‘crash’ when we tried
to use them. Before long, computers will be as trivial and plentiful as chairs
(and a couple of decades or so after that, as sheets of paper or grains of sand)
and we will cease to be aware of the things. In fact I’m sure we will look back
on this last decade and wonder how we could ever have mistaken what we were
doing with them for ‘productivity.’

But the biggest problem is that we are still the first generation of users,
and for all that we may have invented the net, we still don’t really get it.
In ‘The Language Instinct’, Stephen Pinker explains the generational difference
between pidgin and creole languages. A pidgin language is what you get when
you put together a bunch of people – typically slaves – who have already grown
up with their own language but don’t know each others’. They manage to cobble
together a rough and ready lingo made up of bits of each. It lets them get on
with things, but has almost no grammatical structure at all.

However, the first generation of children born to the community takes these
fractured lumps of language and transforms them into something new, with a rich
and organic grammar and vocabulary, which is what we call a Creole. Grammar
is just a natural function of children’s brains, and they apply it to whatever
they find.

The same thing is happening in communication technology. Most of us are stumbling
along in a kind of pidgin version of it, squinting myopically at things the
size of fridges on our desks, not quite understanding where email goes, and
cursing at the beeps of mobile phones. Our children, however, are doing something
completely different. Risto Linturi, research fellow of the Helsinki Telephone
Corporation, quoted in Wired magazine, describes the extraordinary behaviour
kids in the streets of Helsinki, all carrying cellphones with messaging capabilities.
They are not exchanging important business information, they’re just chattering,
staying in touch. "We are herd animals," he says. "These kids
are connected to their herd – they always know where it’s moving." Pervasive
wireless communication, he believes will "bring us back to behaviour patterns
that were natural to us and destroy behaviour patterns that were brought about
by the limitations of technology."

We are natural villagers. For most of mankind’s history we have lived in very
small communities in which we knew everybody and everybody knew us. But gradually
there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became too large and
disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were
unequal to the task of drawing us together. But that is changing.

Interactivity. Many-to-many communications. Pervasive networking. These are
cumbersome new terms for elements in our lives so fundamental that, before we
lost them, we didn’t even know to have names for them.